openSUSE Conference – #oSC12 – Day 1

Having arrived already on Friday (but unfortunately too late for the openSUSE Friday Party), it was just a ‘getting up’, “enjoying” the breakfast in Hotel Krystal and heading down to the venue (which, per description is in ‘walking distance’. Having put the ‘walking distance’ in to a test, I reached the venue within 45 minutes).

Registration went smooth and some nice goodies were handed over. Always nice to get some gifts. And my geeko family at home is growing 🙂 Will need to get additional food supplies I guess.

The first slot of talks I ‘lapsed’ with socializing on the floor only; Great people around and good to finally put a face to IRC Nicknames.

Bernhard M. Wiedeman explains about openQA, its flexibility, its powers and limitations. From the GNOME Team PoV, we should get much better aligned with Bernhard, making sure we actually tests things which we know are sensible to break. In fact, we did that just a few weeks back, when we asked to get ‘gnucash’ on the list of tested applications, simply as historically, this app just always had issues (mostly packaging issues).

Google, Grep and usbmon: Klaus explains us his motivation to learn how the USB Protocol works, how to analyse and reverse engineer it. The findings were interesting and the evolution of computer equipment could clearly be seen: his scanner, which is connected on USB, communicates actually using a parallel port protocol, which in turn has SCSI Commands embedded. Not too surprising, when we look at the history of connection buses for Scanners: First SCSI connected, later migrated to PP (thus, for ease of the vendors, passing SCSI commands on a parallel port), then moved on in time to USB (again, only wrapping this around).

Heading off for lunch, which, for a university restaurant, is on a very acceptable level. Had worse food in better places. Taking the price into account, it is a good deal.

ownCloud under the hood: Klaas gives an overview of ownCloud, some outline in the features and makes developing apps/extensions to the system appealing. The typical difficulties of webdav / full foilder sync are smartly avoided by tracking IDs for changes and rolling them up to parent folders. Thus any folder has information about children’s changes. This helps in stopping the scan at early stages, before parsing the entire folder trees. Well done!

LibreOffce – What’s new: Michael Meeks owns the stage: Never sure with MMeeks if he found the right job or if he missed his carreer: he is GREAT at programming AND presenting (allthough, a very fast speaker, so some people might have difficulties following him at times). Anyway: greatly enjoyed listening to Michael and almost wanted to git clone the LO Tree. But probably not with the conference WLAN.

Crashing the kernel for fun: Stefan Seyfried explains why it can be good to crash/hang the kernel and his journey on finding ways to do so.

Then, off for an evening out! Great fun. Make sure to catch the talks on the videos that are being recorded from the conference.

About the conference
I was fortunate to receive full sponsorship to participate at oSC12. One way of the project to ‘thank’ its active contributors. Thanks openSUSE!